Solidarity Not Charity

scott crow’s Black Flags and Windmills
throws racist media sound bites of looting into the recycle bin of the
internet and places the reader inside the battlefield of hope in New
Orleans after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. crow’s
personal writing is not hampered down with stale homogenized statistics,
instead he shares personal stories of struggle and tragedy that read
more like a novel at times than a current affairs political memoir. The
essence of crow’s book is inspired from Miguel de Cervantes work Don
Quixote.

While Don Quixote saw thirty or forty “hulking giants”
that he planned to fight, Sancho Panza explained that those weren’t
“giants but windmills.” Whether one sees the state and racist ideology
as giants or windmills, crow’s story explains the remedy is to organize
in solidarity with others.

Author John P. Clarke and Kathleen
Cleaver provide forwards for Black Flags and Windmills. Clarke
highlights that with climate collapse, economic exploitation, and
absolute poverty “we live in a state of emergency.” The significance of
crow’s story is “being there for the community” explains Clarke, and
the Common Ground Collective, which crow, Sharon Johnson, and Malik
Rahim helped create is one based on community based mutual aid and
solidarity.

Cleaver writes that Rahim “saw nineteen black
people killed, and local authorities — black and white– refused to
listen to his accounts.” “The bloody past of the toxic war to restore
white supremacy after the collapse of the Confederacy,” writes Cleaver,
“still nourishes violence in Louisiana — right there in Algiers where
Common Ground had hundreds camping on their grounds.”

The Common
Ground Collective (CGC) became the largest anarchist-influenced
organization in modern U.S. history stating that, “With support from
small organizations like ours, communities all over the region fought on
many levels to have access to basic health care, to reopen their
schools, to have decent jobs, to return to their homes and
neighborhoods, and ultimately decide their own fates.”

Known for his
political organizing and being under FBI surveillance, crow is described
as a “puppetmaster involved in direct action,” according to an internal
memo by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI failed to
mention that along with organizing, crow is also a talented writer as
displayed in the following lines, “Smoke filled the air and my lungs
with a haze as lonely helicopters creased the misty grey skies. Somehow,
cranes and other waterfowl ignored everything around them and continued
to hunt for fish on the swollen shores of the canal.”

crow
explained that he came to New Orleans on a humanitarian mission but
found himself in “the beginnings of a possible racial war.” Pointing
out the conflict of this situation, crow explained how the majority of
law enforcement and rescuers they met were white men, “while the
majority of people in distress were a low-income and black population.”
Hitting the essence of praxis (putting theory and reflection into
practice), crow and Darby decided to leave the situation knowing that
they were armed and ready to shoot in self-defense if need be but not
worth it to “hurt someone to aid someone else.”

While back in
Austin, crow received a call from his friend Malik Rahim who said, “‘…we
got racist white vigilantes driving around in pick up trucks
terrorizing black people on the street. It’s very serious. We need
supplies and support.’” The call prompted crow and Darby to return to
New Orleans, they went to the neighborhood of Algiers, where the city
was in shambles as dead bodies laid on the ground.

To counter the
white militias they established neighborhood security. The white
militia was essentially deputized by the police silence allowing them to
function. The militia had openly bragged about killing unarmed blacks
and routinely patrolled neighborhoods and pointed guns at Malik yelling,
“‘get ‘im.’” Their first security plan was to stand on Malik’s porch,
armed. The white vigilantes came by the house in their truck shouting
racist remarks, crow explained they nervously held their ground, the
militia eventually left and the group became more empowered bringing the
community together.

CGC was officially founded on September 5,
2005. Aside from security, the group sought to provide food, water, and
medical attention while maintaining a horizontal, non-hierarchical
power structure drawing inspiration from Zapatista and Black Panther
Party principles. Defying the old anti-anarchist saying, “‘If there is
no state, who will take out the garbage,’” the group went house to house
helping people take their rotting garbage to a safe spot.

CGC
set up their first medical clinic in Algiers at a mosque in the
neighborhood. The first doctor they tried to get into the neighborhood
was denied entry because he was black, crow wrote, “It was as if they
had set up an apartheid system to determine who come into the area.

Unfortunately,
his story was being replicated everywhere.” The Bay Area Radical Health
Collective later helped CGC bringing holistic health care workers and
an official doctor.

Told by state workers that CGC wasn’t even
supposed to exist, crow explained, “The government’s agenda was simple;
clear the area of people by force or starvation.” Discussing his
privilege of being a white able-bodied male, crow wrote how he tossed
away his guilt and used his privilege to access resources such as
people, money, and media. crow discussed the hostility of police
describing how helicopters often circled above them and that drive-bys
in marked and unmarked black vehicles were frequent.

CGC also
became a hub for grassroots media and radio. Volunteers brought UHF
radios, microradio transmitters, Infoshop.org gave support, and the
Indymedia movement “helped tell the deeper stories of New Orleans.”
Another example of decentralized collaboration came from the Food Not
Bombs (FNB) chapter from Hartford. FNB is a network of people who cook
and give out vegetarian food for free to people in need. While the Red
Cross would not go into the Seventh and Ninth Wards to help people who
were stranded, FNB was there and gave out food.

All of CGC’s
problems weren’t external, crow wrote of internal issues with patriarchy
and oppression. In an effort to combat these issues, CGC drew up
Guidelines of Respect (all communiques, documents, activities and
programs are in the appendix), held antioppression workshops, and
created women-only safe temporary shelters. On top of constructing a
culture for their collective, the group typically worked for sixteen to
eighteen hours a day.

To make matters worse, the category 5
Hurricane Rita soon descended on New Orleans intensifying Martial law
and Shoot-to-kill orders. “The military were not there to protect and
serve”, crow wrote, “they were there to do whatever they wanted with
impunity.” CGC was threatened by two soldiers to shut down their aid
operations, leading to a raid on their distribution center deeming it a
“compound” and a “fortress.” With guns pointed and a helicopter blowing
their supplies around, police yelled racial epithets as they rummaged
through the group’s food, water, and medical supplies without a warrant.
When the Red Cross finally arrived in Algiers, crow told of how the
crowd of people in need were greeted with three fifty-foot trailers full
of plastic utensils, napkins, and antiseptic cloths; no food or water!

To combat police hostility, CGC started a Copwatch group with cameras that were donated.

One
incident involved a volunteer named Greg who was filming the police
beat a young black man. Greg maintained a safe distance and was
detained by police, where they made threats on his life saying they
would “‘drop him in the river’ if Copwatch didn’t stop videotaping.”

Copwatch
also discovered “Camp Greyhound,” which was a makeshift FEMA jail
inside of a Greyhound bus station full of mostly black and Latino men.
In addition, the facility lacked access to food and water; and people
were “being held with no processing, without any documentation of their
arrests, access to representation or means to communicate with anyone to
where they were.”

As people started coming back to New Orleans
nearly three months after Katrina, so did the developers. “For city
officials,” crow writes, “poor people were a low priority in terms of
reconnecting services; but some of their homes were of the highest
priority from the coming demolitions.” crow explained that in some
places “residential rents went from $400 to $1200 overnight.” As a way
to fight back against illegal evictions and eminent domain, housing
advocates used direct action and un-evicted people by helping them to
move back into their homes.

A decade after Hurricane Katrina,
bureaucrats and politicians continue to pat themselves on the back in
the name of “progress,” while New Orleans is still devastated and has
been struck with the bayonets of privatization. As pointed out by crow,
cynicism and apathy are big obstacles in the U.S. but CGC is an example
of how community and solidarity can combat tragedy. CGC is a reminder
of the importance of telling your story so others can’t speak for you
and misinterpret your message. John P. Clarke writes, “Common Ground is
part of an enduring, age-old-counter-history, the history that writes
itself against History.” Whether you see hulking giants or windmills,
perception is everything and crow’s perception of solidarity and mutual
aid are more needed than ever.

Chris Steele is a journalist. He can be reached at: csteele@regis.edu.